Our blog and Twitter have been silent for a while now. There are a few reasons, but one of the main ones is we’ve been working really hard on the new Jumpchart.

The trend with most tech companies is to keep everything very secret until it’s ready to launch. There are a lot of reasons why this is smart, but it’s also boring. We’ve sort of followed that trend without giving it too much thought up till the last few days. As it turns out, we think the benefits of sharing what we do and how we do it far outweigh the alternative.

So we may discuss some features that don’t make it to prime time. We might talk about how great something is, then change our minds later. But what’s wrong with giving ourselves that permission? We want to show you what we’re working on.

So without any more preamble, let’s talk about Jumpchart!

We thought it might be fun to catch you up on some of the incomplete designs that didn’t make it.

Starting Out.

This one is a direct predecessor to the thinking behind the current Jumpchart. While it is a cleaner arrangement, and it led to some ideas you’ll see in the version we’re working on, we scrapped it shortly after its creation. We really wanted to do something that felt big. And we wanted it to be responsive. We started here with a basic reorganization of the app, but ended up with a total redesign.

Baby Steps.

This one started to feel better, but the organization, and hierarchy still weren’t right…

Getting Closer!

Finally, we have this incomplete mockup; it’s the last mockup we abandoned before we started on the all new Jumpchart 5 that we’ve been working on for months now. In some ways, it’s the most direct predecessor.

Next time I write, I’ll show you a little bit of what we’ve been building!

I respect and appreciate the fact that you’ll be showing off stuff as you go along. It’s a far more interesting approach (and smarter, marketing-wise). I know that transparency is something we struggle with too, especially when you’re putting so much time into the product just to get it out the door.